FreedmanArt

Hiding in Plain Sight - Press Release

September 27

FreedmanArt is pleased to present its next exhibition, which explores the transformation of common objects. "Hiding in Plain Sight celebrates the artist's power to transform the ordinary. As revision becomes visionary, art becomes revelatory, and we begin to see common objects as the bearers of previously unimagined possibilities." - Carter Ratcliff

BLOUIN ART INFO

“Hiding in Plain Sight” at FreedmanArt, New York

October 5

“Hiding in Plain Sight,” an exhibition of objects common, and curious will be on view at FreedmanArt, New York through December 29, 2018. The exhibition explores the transformation of common objects. The works of art have been made of marble, bronze, or oil paint on well-prepared canvases. Modernism turned artists’ attention to fugitive materials.

Hamptons Art Hub

NYC Gallery Scene - Highlights

September 30

FreedmanArt presents “Hiding in Plain Sight, Objects Common & Curious,” in collaboration with American art critic, writer, and poet Carter Ratcliff. An investigation of the transformation of common, found, and readymade objects, the exhibition features works by early 20th century masters through today’s contemporary masters including Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Helen Frankenthaler, Pablo Picasso, Nancy Graves, Frank Stella, and Jean Shin, among others.

The New Criterion

by Mario Naves

June 19, 2018

To get an idea of the curious byways an artist might find himself exploring, here, in the twenty-first century, you can’t do better than head to the New York Studio School’s “Glenn Goldberg: Plums and Breezes,” an adumbrated, if somewhat bumpy, overview spanning forty years. “Plums and Breezes” begins in 1977, when Goldberg entered the Studio School as a student, and works its way to pieces of a more recent vintage by the now–Associate Professor of Painting at Queens College. Goldberg’s trajectory, and more so his landing place, offer an example of how quixotic the artist’s lot has become. Contemporary artists work in a media landscape teeming with imagery, not to mention a culture inured to the notion that art is an endeavor free of standards or definition. Creative types have been left to their own devices in ways that were unimaginable one hundred, let alone five hundred, years ago. The challenge of operating within this increasingly fluid playing field isn’t realizing an individual vision, but instead making that vision matter. Given the rabbit holes into which artists ensconce themselves nowadays, the big question is why the rest of us should feel obliged to follow.

By Karen Wilkin

April 28, 2018

Also on the Upper East Side, through early May, “Colors,” at FreedmanArt, brings together the work of more than twenty-five artists, all known for their inventive, expressive use of color, whether brilliant, raucous, or muted. It’s a notably diverse group of works on paper, paintings, and collages by such luminaries as Josef Albers, Jack Bush, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Larry Poons, Susan Roth, Kurt Schwitters, and Frank Stella, among others. The gallery has been doing interesting thematic shows for some time—everything from works of art given by artists to their friends and colleagues to prints by painters who devoted a good deal of time to exploring other media. This exhibition takes as its point of departure a poem written by then twelve-year-old Zoe Kusyk, a student in Charlottesville, Virginia, a 2016 winner of “Writer’s Eye,” an annual competition held by the Fralin Museum of the University of Virginia that “challenges writers of all ages to create original works of poetry and prose inspired by works of art on display in the Museum.” Ms. Kusyk’s winning poem, titled “Colors,” was a response to a 1977 painting by Larry Poons, a cascade of liquid hues pulled by gravity into parallel but active rivulets, now remaining distinct, now mingling.

(An Appropriate Distance) From the Mayor's Doorstep

Review: "Colors" at FreedmanArt

By Piri Halasz

April 1, 2018

A singularly inventive group show at FreedmanArt is “Colors” (through May 12). The idea for it was born when the gallery’s director, Ann Freedman, visited the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA last year, to see its exhibition devoted to Sam Kootz, the pioneering art dealer who early on represented Adolph Gottlieb, Motherwell & Hofmann, among others. While Freedman was there, her attention was drawn to a poem entitled “Colors” by a 12-year-old schoolgirl named Zoe Kusyk that had been inspired by a 1977 Larry Poons painting at the Fralin. The poem had won first prize in the annual competition inspired by the museum for works of prose or poetry inspired by works in the museum’s collection. The poem itemizes different colors but perfectly captures the way they all run together in the Poons painting and tells how the disparate but very human stories they tell also become one in the end.

2017—

FreedmanArt

Press Release

FreedmanArt is pleased to present an exhibition of three outstanding artists
who brilliantly explored the expansive range of printmaking. The working
engagement and spirit of collaboration in their printmaking fueled the
creative genius within each of these artists.

Arte Fuse

By Jonathan Goodman

June 15, 2017

Kit White, a painter of indisputably lyric accomplishment, is currently showing at two venues: FreedmanArt and the Institute of Fine Arts.
Kit White, a painter of indisputably lyric accomplishment, is currently showing at two venues: FreedmanArt and the Institute of Fine Arts. White, now a mature artist is a long resident of New York City, where he has practiced a distinctive form of poetic suggestion, in which rickety, skeletal structures occupy the center of the composition, whose surrounds indicate a lonely landscape. Interestingly, though, his efforts do not necessarily derive from the New York School—even though White showed twice with Betty Parsons, a major gallerist of the movement, in the late 1970s. Certainly, he recognizes the fact that the abstract artists working shortly before him filled their paintings with inchoate, nonobjective form, intending to portray the strong emotion resulting from that form. But White is looking not so much for an expressionist intensity as he is interested in communicating a view that derives from a philosophical outlook and earlier history. A reader of contemporary poetry as well as a former student of Latin and Greek, White recognizes a time when culture was slower—a time when the act of painting was mediated by a knowledge of what preceded it, and when poetry was actually read.

FreedmanArt

Press Release

Kit White: The Nature of This Place | Opening Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Monday, March 6, 2017

FreedmanArt is pleased to present The Nature of This Place, an exhibition of paintings by Kit White, opening Tuesday, March 21, 2017. From 5:30pm to 7:30pm, FreedmanArt will host a reception and a book signing with the artist to celebrate the release of the new monograph by Carter Ratcliff, Kit White: Line Into Form.

2016—

(An Appropriate Distance) From the Mayor's Doorstep

Social (& Esthetic) Notes From All Over

By Piri Halasz

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

This jewel of an exhibition features 34 mostly small works that were given by the artists who created them to friends—fellow artists, dealers, collectors, curators and critics.
Most of the entries on the checklist list the owners demurely as “private collection,” but some of the inscriptions are more revealing.
Thus we have a colored postcard with a Kenneth Noland target image, cleverly decorated with verticals on either side of the target to suggest (to my twisted mind, at least) the impression of a place setting, with fork, plate and knife.

ArtFile Magazine

By Johnny Thornton

March 2016

“...The idea of making a painting that is quiet, at times a bit complicated and stirred, yet ordered and dreamy is at the center of these works. They are airy and do not assert themselves as matter. For the most part, they tend to exist in the sky or in the water. They incorporate aspects of the decorative arts and are concerned with both what a painting can be and what painting already is. I am lost inside of them. They include questions and have their own demands. They always want to be more than they are. It is difficult to be legible, challenging to be generous, and an effort to push through a variety of obstacles in order to give fully to them.”

FreedmanArt

Press Release

FreedmanArt is pleased to present "Of Leaves and Clouds," an invitational exhibition featuring paintings, works on paper, and collages by the New York artist Glenn Goldberg, opening Saturday, March 5, 2016, with a reception for the artist from 5:30pm-8:00pm. The subject, "Of Leaves and Clouds," will include themes present throughout decades of Goldberg’s work.

The Hudson Review

By Karen Wilkin

Winter 2016

“Passion and Commitment” was the title of a remarkable show at FreedmanArt this season: selections from the collection lovingly and perceptively assembled over more than six decades by the eminent Philadelphia-based radiation oncologist Dr. Luther W. Brady, Jr.

2015—

Art Daily

Make Room for Color Field opens at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City

Saturday, December 12, 2015

A single act of generosity by a collector and supporter of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City has resulted in the gifting of five more works of art, a handful of loans, and an installation celebrating Color Field painting. Luther W. Brady, M.D., one of the world’s foremost oncologists, gifted the museum with Jules Olitski’s Embraced: Yellow and Black, in the memory of his dear friend Joanne Lyon, a longtime supporter of the Nelson-Atkins. Inspired by that gift, an anonymous donor loaned the Nelson-Atkins Helen Frankenthaler’s Elberta, another quintessential example of Color Field painting. Then Kristina Olitski gave the Nelson-Atkins four Jules Olitski prints to complement one already owned by the museum, thereby creating a complete set. The recent acquisitions, not including the Olitski prints, will be celebrated in the installation Make Room for Color Field, which opened Dec. 11.

FreedmanArt

Passion and Commitment: The Art of Luther Brady

Opening October 30, 2015

Friday, October 9, 2015

FreedmanArt takes great pleasure in presenting "Passion and Commitment: The Art of Luther Brady," opening to the public October 30, 2015. Dr. Luther W. Brady, Jr. is a world renowned oncologist and honored arts patron.

artcritical.com

By David Carrier

Friday, April 3, 2015

Some finished works of art efface evidence of the process of their own making. A painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or Philip Pearlstein doesn’t reveal how it was made — in that way, it is like a photograph. There is, by contrast, a special fascination in art which, by revealing the activity of its own making, makes that process part of its meaning. Such art, it might be said, is the most aesthetic visual art — it is doubly art because we both identify its abstract or figurative subject and enjoy seeing how that subject was rendered. We find this happening with Abstract Expressionism, as represented at FreedmanArt’s “Art in the Making,” by marvelous signature style works by Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, among others, and by artworks from artists of succeeding generations who extended that tradition.

2014—

FreedmanArt

New exhibition: "Art in the Making," opening Thursday October 30

Reception from 6-8:30pm

FreedmanArt is pleased to present Art in the Making; an exhibition honoring art, the history of whose making is part of its meaning, with over twenty artists included. Art in the Making opens Thursday, October 30.
In a time of constant change and advances in the methods of “making,” this exhibition hopes to provide a lens into time-honored art institutions, as triggered by the overlapping of the 50th anniversary of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture, and the 140th anniversary of The Art Students League of New York. This brings us to appreciate original and early approaches to teaching, learning, and making; as relevant today as in decades and centuries gone by.

The Hudson Review

By Karen Wilkin

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

A few blocks away, at FreedmanArt, “Carved, Cast, Crushed, Constructed” included an equally impressive group of intimately scaled sculptures by artists ranging from Joseph Cornell and David Smith to Lee Bontecou and Frank Stella, plus one “abstract” antique artifact, all assembled, like much of the Mnuchin exhibition, from private collections.

artdaily.com

NEW YORK, NY.- FreedmanArt and the Jules Olitski family present “Olitski Visions” at Tower 49, 12 East 49th Street, now extended through August 2014. On Wednesday, July 23, 5:30pm – 8:00pm, Ai Kato, Art Director, Gallery at Tower 49, will host a summer reception in celebration of the installation, in the main lobby at Tower 49.

FreedmanArt

Carved, Cast, Crushed, Constructed

Saturday, March 8, 2014

FreedmanArt is pleased to present Carved, Cast, Crushed, Constructed, an exhibition of a diverse group of artists seen through the lens of the many distinctive methods in the making of sculpture, from David Smith's 1943 marble Sewing Machine to Frank Stella's 2011 mixed media construction.
This exhibition highlights a choice selection of three-dimentional work, by approximately fifteen artists, whose sculpture can be further appreciated by the use of their inventive, creative techniques and materials.
The works on exhibition, with several significant loans, include Alexander Calder's 1948 Samba Rattle; to the age old lost wax process of Nancy Graves' poly-chromed sculpture; and to that of John Chamberlain's 1991 crushed and colored metal forms.

2013—

The Boston Globe

By Cate McQuaid

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Jules Olitski, best known as a color-field painter of deliciously vaporous, layered mists of color, cycled through several styles and had a roller coaster of a career. Olitski died at 84 in 2007, and several of his exuberant, flashy late works are up at Adelson Galleries Boston.

(An Appropriate Distance) From the Mayor's Doorstep

Report From the Front: 3 Times & Places

By Piri Halasz

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Finally, for those who just like fine painting, and don’t feel the need to stay up on the latest wrinkles, I can strongly recommend “Jules Olitski on an Intimate Scale…and Friends” at Freedman Art.
This exhibition of small works by Olitski from 1961 through to 2007 (the year he died) is a version of the exhibition at George Washington University in Washington DC that I warmly reviewed last year, and that I am equally delighted to welcome to the Big Apple.

artdaily.org

NEW YORK, NY.- FreedmanArt presents “Jules Olitski On An Intimate Scale… and Friends.” This exhibition opens Thursday, October 24. The more than thirty works in this exhibition present a retrospective overview of Olitski’s paintings through the artist’s distinctive periods: “Core/Stain” paintings; “Sprays”; “Baroque”; “High Baroque”; and the “Late” paintings. This exhibition demonstrates the immediacy of Olitski’s intimate and small-scale paintings.

Art & Antiques Magazine

By John Dorfman

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

This month, when the Museum of Arts and Design in New York opens its show “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital”—the first by a major museum to examine “the increasingly important role of digital fabrication in contemporary art, architecture and design practice”—among the more than 80 artists represented in it will be Frank Stella. It might seem strange to some that an artist who started out in the 1950s and had a retrospective at MoMA as early as 1970 would be making work with 3-D printing technology just like some straight-out-of-art-school kid, but to those familiar with Stella’s protean nature and taste for boundary-pushing, it makes complete sense. Having first attracted attention with flatter-than-flat hard-edged paintings, Stella has been steadily expanding into space ever since, beginning with low relief and collage and proceeding to curved canvases, paintings with projecting sculpture-like elements, and out-and-out sculpture—although Stella prefers to think of his free-standing works as paintings in three dimensions or “sculptural paintings,” rather than sculptures.

FreedmanArt

Jules Olitski On An Intimate Scale... and Friends

Thursday, October 24, 2013

FreedmanArt is pleased to present "Jules Olitski On An Intimate Scale… and Friends," opening October 24. The more than thirty works in this exhibition present a retrospective overview of Jules Olitski’s paintings through five decades. With the addition of “friends,” we are presenting works of those artists who have enjoyed artistic camaraderie and friendship with Jules Olitski, including works by Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, Larry Poons, and David Smith. "Jules Olitski On An Intimate Scale… and Friends" is adapted from an exhibition organized by The George Washington University Luther W. Brady Art Gallery in fall of 2012 and traveled to the Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania in spring of 2013.

(An Appropriate Distance) From the Mayor's Doorstep

By Piri Halasz

Sunday, August 25, 2013

During these last few days in August, we have been having idyllic weather in the Big Apple, so, if you're not at the seashore or in Paris, here's an elegant small installation in midtown to go and see. It's “Jules Olitski: Tower 49, NYC,” which was curated by Lauren Olitski Poster and mounted back in May in the lobby and entrance plaza of the 45-story steel and green glass office skyscraper known as “Tower 49.” The building’s official address is 12 East 49th Street, but it can also be entered from 48th Street, and occupies a considerable portion of the east-west block between Madison and Fifth Avenues.

The Wall Street Journal

Jules Olitski at Tower 49

By Peter Plagens

Saturday, August 17, 2013

These days, in a 21st-century art world that seems as different from the formalist passions of 40 or 50 years ago as Dada was from court painting patronized by the Habsburgs, Mr. Olitski's work has assumed the status of stately, historical objects. This is pleasantly evident in the yearlong installation of eight large paintings and an Anthony Caro-esque sculpture in the lobby of a Midtown skyscraper called Tower 49.

The Art Newspaper

By Julia Halperin

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Three-dimensional printing enables artists to realise sculptures in previously impractical shapes and sizes. The technology creates 3-D objects from digital models by printing thousands of successive layers of material. The artist Frank Stella was an early adopter. In the mid-2000s, he used a 3-D printer to produce metal and resin segments for his spiraling polychrome sculpture series “Scarlatti Kirkpatrck”. The technology gave Stella “an opportunity to project work out from the wall in a way that would have been difficult, and too heavy, using traditional means”, says Ron Labaco, a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. He will include Stella’s work in an exhibition devoted to computer-enabled work, “Out of Hand: Materialising the Postdigital”, which is scheduled to open on 14 October.

Yares Art Projects

Yares Art Projects presents paintings and drawings from American abstract painter, printmaker, and sculptor Jules Olitski; many of which have never been publicly shown before. From 1960 through 1964, Olitski created many of his paintings by staining: pouring acrylic paint onto raw (unprimed or unprepared) canvas so that it soaked directly into the cloth. This exhibition features a selection of works from this period, known as the "Stain" paintings.

Tower 49®, 12 East 49th Street, New York 10017

Jules Olitski, Installation at Tower 49®

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The Jules Olitski family and FreedmanArt are pleased to present eight paintings and two sculptures by Jules Olitski, spanning the years 1965 – 1982. All works are from the Olitski family collection. The artist himself might well agree that the modernist design and open spaces provide an extraordinary setting for this selection of large-scale painting and rarely seen sculptures for this special installation. We are most grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Tower 49® and to be sharing the seminal work of Olitski in this extraordinary public venue.
In honor of Jules Olitski, Installation at Tower 49®, FreedmanArt and the Jules Olitski Family invite you for a reception hosted by Tower 49® Wednesday, June 26, from 5:30 - 7:30 pm.

The Wall Street Journal

New Explorations in a Universe of Color

By Vibhuti Patel

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Natvar Bhavsar uses dry pigment to create large, brilliantly colored, mural-like paintings. Critics
often place the Indian-born artist in the context of the genesis of abstract art in America,
comparing him with Abstract Expressionists and "color-field" painters like Mark Rothko and
Barnett Newman. But Mr. Bhavsar's method of building up surfaces through layers of dry
pigment is his own. Though he harks back to India's classical music and ancient aesthetics,
Sanskrit literature and subcontinental seasons as sources of inspiration or fodder for his titles, his
approach is modern American, not ethnic Indian.

(An Appropriate Distance) From The Mayor's Doorstep

by Piri Halasz

Monday, April 15, 2013

Not all the Manhattan gallery shows worthy of discussion are in Chelsea, SoHo or the Lower East Side. There are still hardy survivors in midtown and on the Upper East Side, and four exhibitions in particular have provided enjoyment for me as winter—at long last—is giving way to spring. Three of them are – or were – at Spanierman, which has been claiming so much of my attention in the last year or so that some readers may be getting suspicious—but really, there is nothing to be suspicious about. The gallery simply seems to be displaying better taste than almost every other.

The Independent, UK

by Michael Glover

Friday, April 12, 2013

Is it a crooning junkyard angel of the kind that Bob Dylan once praised in "From a Buick 6"? The mood of this bruising sculpture by Frank Stella is one of explosive visual excess, from its bucking, roller-coasterish shapeliness to its blaring, fruity tones.

The New Criterion

by Brendan Dooley

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

On view through May 31, “Painterly Pasted Pictures” at FreedmanArt in New York is a small but smart exhibition that brings together a group of collages from the 20th century united by the stylistic trait of “painterliness.” Popularized by Swiss art historian Heinrich Wolfflin, painterliness describes paintings that are loosely and openly styled, with emphasis placed on visible brushstrokes and the application of paint rather than on the sharp delineation of forms and objects. Featuring rare collages from Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Alfred Leslie, Robert Motherwell, Anne Ryan, Kurt Schwitters, Jack Youngerman, Frank Stella, and Ellsworth Kelly, among others, the show has been carefully selected to demonstrate different manifestations of painterliness in the collage form.

The Menil Collection

A Retrospective of Drawings by Lee Bontecou, January 31 - May 11, 2014

Thursday, March 14, 2013

"Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds" is the first retrospective exhibition of the drawings of American artist Lee Bontecou. Born in 1931, the works selected span more than five decades of Bontecou’s career, from the late 1950s, when she began her innovative works on paper with welding torch and soot as a drawing tool and medium while studying in Rome as a Fulbright Scholar, to the work that is ongoing in her Pennsylvania studio. Like her sculptures, which are made primarily of welded steel, canvas, porcelain, and vacuum-formed plastic, her drawings highlight the ingenuity and bravura of her experiments with materials and ways of creating and making spatial form. “Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds,” is curated by Michelle White for The Menil Collection, and will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with new scholarly texts. The exhibition will travel to The Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey, in late spring of 2014.

FreedmanArt

Painterly Pasted Pictures: Braque and Arp to Stella and Kelly

by E. A. Carmean, Jr.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

The exhibition entitled Painterly Pasted Pictures at the FreedmanArt Gallery brings together a group of
collages that share the formal trait of "painterliness," either in part or whole. This stylistic characteristic, the
opposite of crisp (cut) profiles and simple, balanced compositional layouts, is one not usually associated with
the standard idea of the modern collage. But, "painterliness" is nonetheless an essential feature of many
collages made by the Abstract Expressionists, including their works featured in this show.

ARTDAILY

NEW YORK, NY.- FreedmanArt presents the exhibition Painterly Pasted Pictures opening February 21, 2013. This show features collages on loan from important private collections, with a concentration on works by the artists of the Abstract Expressionist generation as well as several artists of the broader successive movements. The exhibition will feature important collages by Willem deKooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Al Leslie, Robert Motherwell, Ann Ryan, Kurt Schwitters, Frank Stella, Jack Youngerman, Robert Rauchenberg, as well as works by other artists.

The Reading Eagle

By Ron Schira

Sunday, February 17, 2013

With all of the information available online, one would think it would be nothing at all to write an article about the renowned painter Jules Olitski. Yet even with as much information as one can gather, it does nothing to satisfy the senses as much as actually being in front of his physical and luminescent abstractions, which for much of his career have been of epic dimensions.

Press Release

Painterly Pasted Pictures

Thursday, January 16, 2013

FreedmanArt will present the exhibition Painterly Pasted Pictures opening February 21, 2013. This show features collages on loan from important private collections, with a concentration on works by the artists of the Abstract Expressionist generation as well as several artists of the broader successive movements.

2012—

ArtDaily

By Karen Wilkin

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

British sculptor Anthony Caro and American painter Jules Olitski are an unlikely pair, each specializing in widely different forms of art from one another. However to the naked eye, the two men are closely linked in talent.

The Jewish Daily Forward

By Menachem Wecker

Tuesday, October 29, 2012

It’s hard to explain the feeling one experiences when standing in front of, and contemplating the dynamic movement in, Jules Olitski’s paintings. Picture a beautiful yet quickly fleeting vision of creamer diffusing throughout a cup of coffee. If one freezes the frame when the cloudiness is at its height — just before the dairy explosion mixes fully with the coffee and becomes dull and monochromatic — you might begin to imagine the forms in some of Olitski’s paintings from the 1980s and ’90s.

The Washington Post

By Maura Judkis

Friday, October 12, 2012

Working with an unusual arsenal.
No artist could wield a brush quite like Jules Olitski. Critic Clement Greenberg once called him “the best painter alive.”
No one could wield a leaf blower quite like him, either. Considered a master of Color Field painting for his richly chromatic work, Olitski earned Greenberg’s accolade in part by embracing unorthodox tools. Squeegees, leaf blowers, paint guns and industrial brushes -- the implements of commercial painters and handymen -- were all in his arsenal, creating textured canvases that exude indulgence and restraint, sometimes simultaneously. His paint fell on his canvas as lightly as the fine mist of a sneeze, or as thick as icing on a cake.

PRESS RELEASE

Caro and Olitski: Masters of Abstraction Draw the Figure

October 11, 2012

FreedmanArt is pleased to present Caro and Oltaki: Masters of Abstraction Draw the
Figure.
These drawings, many seen for the first time, convincingly express for Anthony Caro
and Jules Olitski their common interest and long commitment to working directly
from the model, also known as "life drawing".
Our exhibition is a reprisal of the one in L996, held at The New York Studio School.
An expanded selection and publication is being planned for institutional venues.
Prime examples of the abstract work of Olitski and Caro will offer both a context, as
well as further understanding to the relationships between their figurative and
abstract forces.

The Pink Line Project

Exhibitions

Friday, September 21, 2012

This fall, three institutions are celebrating the art of Jules Olitski (1922-2007). Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis and the British sculptor Anthony Caro were brought into public prominence by art critic Clement Greenberg, who coined the term "post-painterly abstraction." Olitski was a close friend and neighbor of Noland's, when Olitski taught at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, and Noland lived nearby. In the 1960s Olitski generally shared with Noland, and other members of the Washington Color School, an approach to painting in which the canvas is covered with pure areas of color, characterized, as well, by experimentation with color and pigments. Olitski applied the paint by staining, then spraying, and later used unconventional tools such as brooms, mops, and leaf blowers, among other things. His richly diverse surfaces diffused color and light, often with rich variations in texture.

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Works 1958-2012

September 8, 2012 - January 20, 2013

Frank Stella (born 1936) is one of the last living heroes of American painting from the 1950s and 1960s. Stella’s recent works demonstrate yet again his compelling path in the direction of abstraction. Hardly twenty-years old, the young artist conquered the New York art scene in the late 1950s with a sensation: His large Black Paintings not only intensified the debate on Minimalism in painting but also prepared the way for the “exit from the picture into space.” But unlike his contemporaries, Stella took a completely independent path that led him to ever more opulent, ever more baroque reliefs. With his turn “from Minimalism to Maximalism,” Frank Stella developed into one of the most distinctive artists of the 20th century. Featuring circa 60 mostly large-format works as well as 30 drawings and sketches, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is honoring Frank Stella with a comprehensive exhibition that makes up the capstone to the wide range of presentations celebrating the artist’s 75th birthday.

artcritical

by Piri Halasz

Monday, August 20, 2012

Ernst Häckel’s famous theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny – the development of an organism, that is to say, mirrors the evolution of the species – applies to Frank Stella in relation to Western art since the Middle Ages. His severe but elegant “pinstripe” paintings of the late 1950s and early ‘60s, together with the gentler aluminum and bronze paintings that succeeded them, can be seen as his Quattrocento period (and, not surprisingly, won much praise when a group of all three series was shown at L & M Arts earlier this year).

Bloomberg

by James Tarmy

July 24, 2012

Wearing an old brown fedora, a shirt decorated with a marlin and rumpled khakis, Frank Stella, 76, walks through his show at the FreedmanArt Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side.
On view is a selection of his recent sculptures. Abstract and candy colored, with intricate frames suspended on metal armature, they were created through a process called rapid prototyping.

The Wall Street Journal

by James Panero

July 6, 2012

What does music look like? A century ago, the Theosophists, an esoteric group that influenced the early modernists, believed they could see colors floating above performances of Mendelssohn, Gounod and Wagner. The look of music drove Wassily Kandinsky to experiment with abstraction.

The New York Times

by Roberta Smith

July 5, 2012

It takes awhile to appreciate the sheer formal intelligence of Frank Stella’s hyperactive polychrome wall pieces. Their spiraling forms, shot through with hairpin and curving rods of thin painted tubing, are inspired by the pell-mell music of Scarlatti and the crisp complexities of late Kandinsky. If you look closely, many of them feature ribbons of color that twist and ripple outward from one or two central points: configurations that might almost have been lifted from earlier Stella stripe paintings, unleashed into three dimensions.

The Wall Street Journal

by Kelly Crow

Saturday/Sunday, June 30 - July 1, 2012

New York artist Frank Stella's new sculptures come with their own soundtrack.
Mr. Stella rose to fame a half-century ago by painting pinstripes on canvases cut to look like geometric shapes—a move that helped push postwar art beyond the roiling brush strokes of Abstract Expressionism toward the flatter simplicity of Minimalism. He later created prints and sculptures that explore ideas of geometric abstraction.

This exhibition draws together more than 30 significant works from public and highlights important periods and themes from Olitski’s career. With works from his early Stain Paintings of the 1960s to his Late Paintings, this is the first exhibition of the artist’s paintings since his death in 2007. Russian-born artist Jules Olitski (1922–2007) first received international acclaim as a Color Field painter and continued to experiment throughout his career. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by E.A. Carmean Jr., Alison de Lima Greene, and Karen Wilkin. After its showing at the Kemper Museum, the exhibition traveled to The Museum of Fine Arts-Houston, is currently at Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, and will travel to American University Museum, Washington, D.C.

PRESS RELEASE

Frank Stella: New Work

April 20, 2012

The gallery is pleased to present newly created work by Frank Stella for our upcoming exhibition, opening on Thursday May 17, 2012. Frank Stella, widely acclaimed as one of America’s most original, influential, and inventive artists, continues to explore and forge new ground with his most recent relief sculpture, the Scarlatti Kirkpatrick series, initiated in 2006. This bold new chapter, in an exceptional six-decade career, was inspired by the harpsichord sonatas of eighteenth-century Italian composer, Dominico Scarlatti, and the writings of twentieth-century American musicologist, Ralph Kirkpatrick.

artcritical

by David Cohen

March 24, 2012

The paintings of Jack Bush were once described by Hilton Kramer as “a garden for the eye,” an apt analogy for images that balance chromatic vibrancy and earthiness. Canada’s participant in Color Field Painting held an obstinate remove from either the geometric hard edges or the ethereal sprays and stains of his confreres south of the border. His paintings impact the retina with a dull thud. Color is intense but somehow un-ingratiating, as if mixed with soot and chalk. The oafishness of his shapes and strokes and the uneasy back and forth between painterliness and pictoriality – foreground gesture and background expanse – make him provincial for the period in which he worked and uncannily relevant for the present. Sing Sing Sing (1974) arrays a fluttering string of rough-torn ribbons – an anti-spectrum of anonymous color samples – against an agitated, nauseatingly meat-like, marbled ground. Beauty and the Beast.
Jack Bush: New York Visit at FreedmanArt, February 18 to April 28, 2012.

The New Yorker

Goings on About Town: Art

February 7, 2012

The great, uncategorizable American sculptor, now eighty-one, continues to surprise and enchant. Dirigible-like forms hang from the ceiling, dangling beaded tails. Two sandboxes, of the type the artist uses in her Pennsylvania studio to experiment with the arrangement of objects – feathers, shells, animal skeletons fashioned from porcelain, serpentine forms made of mesh- are being exhibited here for the first time.

The New Criterion

Gallery Chronicle: Lee Bontecou

by James Panero

February 1, 2012

Finally this month offers up our last chance to see the art world’s original alternative in her current show. Lee Bontecou always refused to be taken in. After bursting onto the scene in the 1960’s with her singular and haunting wall sculptures of layered canvases, often stitched around gaping voids, she retreated entirely from public view. Yet she never stopped making art. Now in her eighties, she is as inventive and singular as ever. Her exhibition of drawings and sculptures on view at FreedmanArt through February 11 is not to be missed.

ARTnews

Lee Bontecou at FreedmanArt

by Barbara Pollack

January 1, 2012

Sailing into the future with a fleet of fantastic mobiles , this magnificent exhibition would indicate that Lee Bontecou has no intention of slowing down. The works here are at once delicate and powerful, modernist and contemporary, serene and frightening. It is a difficult balance, but Bontecou handles the contradictions with a masterful use of unconventional materials.

2011—

The Wall Street Journal

by Peter Plagens

December 24, 2011

The centerpieces of this gallery exhibition are four hanging sculptures, each about a yard long, that look like amalgams of clipper ships and jellyfish. They're ingeniously balanced with hanging fishing weights of different sizes and shapes. The nice touch of dirtying up the rear surfaces of the mobiles' "sails" adds to their feeling of soaring optimistically through the air. But the nicest touch is simply Ms. Bontecou's matchless deftness in combining volumetric and linear form to wring an awful lot of emotive response from nothing but untitled things.

The New York Times

by Ken Johnson

December 15, 2011

Now 80, Lee Bontecou has traveled a long way since her militaristic reliefs of bent rods, wire and canvas made her famous in the late 1950s and ’60s. In subsequent decades she traded brutalist confrontation for formal delicacy and mental travel into fabulous other universes.

The Village Voice

by Robert Shuster

November 9, 2011

For more than half a century, Lee Bontecou has been peering into the cosmos. Her famously imposing three-dimensional vortexes of the early 1960s—grungy swaths of canvas stitched onto spiraling armatures—grabbed your attention with the gravitational strength of black holes.

Haunch of Venison, London, UK

Haunch of Venison London is delighted to present Frank Stella: Connections, the most extensive exhibition of Stella’s work in the UK to date. This exhibition will examine Stella’s long and extraordinarily diverse career and will include works from 1958 to the present day.
In collaboration with FreedmanArt, New York, US. Fall 2011

ARTnews

by Barbara A. MacAdam

August 8, 2011

Throughout his career, Jules Olitski stood just off-center of the core American Abstract Expressionists. This enlightening (all puns intended) exhibition, “Embracing Circles 1959–1964,” shows the artist at a concentrated moment in a career marked by various styles, the most signature being his multi-toned, spray-painted works.

The New Criterion

by James Panero

June 24, 2011

In an age of gallery closings, it's nice to welcome an opening, especially when the opener is the inimitable Ann Freedman, the former director of Knoedler and Company. FreedmanArt is her new venture with several familiar names.

Art in America Magazine

by Leigh Anne Miller

June 21, 2011

Pairs of jiggly biomorphic circles jostle in richly hued fields in 10 large, super-mod abstractions from the early 1960s, a key period in Jules Olitski's career. Seeing these paintings in person helps you understand why Clement Greenberg and legions of other admirers fell head-over-heels for Olitski's work

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski

June 11 2010

This exhibition draws together more than 30 significant works from public and highlights important periods and themes from Olitski’s career. With works from his early Stain Paintings of the 1960s to his Late Paintings, this is the first exhibition of the artist’s paintings since his death in 2007. Russian-born artist Jules Olitski (1922–2007) first received international acclaim as a Color Field painter and continued to experiment throughout his career. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by E.A. Carmean Jr., Alison de Lima Greene, and Karen Wilkin. After its showing at the Kemper Museum, the exhibition travels to The Museum of Fine Arts-Houston; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and American University Museum, Washington, D.C.; in 2012.
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art Weblink

ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany

Lee Bontecou: Insights, ZKM

May 27th, 2011

For the first time in thirty years and to mark the occasion of her 80th birthday, the work of US-American artist Lee Bontecou is to be honored by an exhibition held at the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition provides insights into the Bontecou’s innovative work of the 1960s.

The International Sculpture Center

The ISC's Board of Trustees established the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991 to recognized individual sculptors who have made exemplary contributions to the field of sculpture. Candidates for the award are masters of sculptural processes and techniques who have devoted their careers to the development of a laudable body of sculptural work as well as to the advancement of the sculpture field as a whole.

ARTnewsletter

by Eileen Kinsella

February 8, 2011

NEW YORK — Ann Freedman, former director and president of Knoedler & Company, told ARTnewsletter she plans to launch a new gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan next season, where she will work with artists including Lee Bontecou and Frank Stella, as well as the estate of color-field painter Jules Olitski.

1970—

Press Release: Kit White: Walls and Occupied Spaces

March 13, 2019

FreedmanArt is very pleased to present Walls and Occupied Spaces, new paintings by Kit White, opening April 16, 2019.
The spaces in these paintings exist as metaphorical landscapes occupied by linear constructions derived from both the organic and inorganic
Kit White’s new work incorporates photographic images into his paintings as poignant backdrops to abstract lines. The photograph provides a material, worldly context for the drawing, which is abstract in nature and represents the real.
This new series of works seek out images of land that have been scarred by conflict. Initially, the images were of contested spaces of what we have traditionally referred to as the Middle East, places where competing claims to land have led to warlike confrontations. But confrontations of all kinds, violent and non-violent, surround us and announce themselves through walls, barriers, and borders,not always physical, which symbolize the fraught politics of occupation, actual and symbolic. The artist found himself drawn to the photographs of Matthew Brady (1822 – 1896) of the Civil War, thinking about the wall born of that conflict, a psychological division that continues to separate us.

Kit White Artist Statement: Walls and Occupied Spaces

March, 2019

Over the years, I have approached the space of my paintings as metaphorical landscapes. They have horizons and are occupied by linear elements that act as surrogates for structures both organic and inorganic. But because paintings are wholly created spaces, the parameters by which they are judged are formal in nature. All content reaches the viewer through a formal lens. Yet, it is the other lens, the photographic lens, through which we now receive most of our knowledge of the world and contextualizes most of what we know of it.
(download PDF to read full statement)

Blouin ArtInfo

FreedmanArt “Colors” brings together works of more than 25 artists under one roof at its New York venue through August 17, 2018
“Colors” features artwork by Josef Albers, Lee Bontecou, Jack Bush, Friedel Dzubas, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Glenn Goldberg, Nancy Graves, Stephen Greene, Grace Hartigan, Hans Hofmann, Paul Jenkins, Alfred Leslie, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Susan Roth, Kurt Schwitters, David Smith, Theodoros Stamos, Frank Stella, Esteban Vicente, John Walker, Kit White, and Jack Youngerman. All the artists are known for their inventive, expressive use of color, whether brilliant, raucous, or muted. It is a notably diverse group of works on paper, paintings, and collages by such luminaries as Josef Albers among others. FreedmanArt has been doing interesting thematic shows for some time — everything from works of art given by artists to their friends and colleagues to prints by painters who devoted a good deal of time to exploring other media. "Colors" takes as its point of departure a poem written by then twelve-year-old Zoe Kusyk, a student in Charlottesville, Virginia, a 2016 winner of “Writer’s Eye,” an annual competition held by the Fralin Museum of the University of Virginia that “challenges writers of all ages to create original works of poetry and prose inspired by works of art on display in the Museum.” “Colors,” was a response to a 1977 painting by Larry Poons, a cascade of liquid hues pulled by gravity into parallel but active rivulets, now remaining distinct, now mingling.
“Our commitment is to the artist, and to bringing art and collector together. FreedmanArt serves to educate the public with an active exhibition program, guided by invitational artist exhibitions and special project conceptions, both historical and new,” says the gallery. The exhibition is on view through August 17, 2018, at FreedmanArt, 25 east 73rd street New York NY 10021.
http://www.blouinartinfo.com